It’s not that he’s mean. It’s just that when it comes to seeing how his policies affect people, George W. Bush doesn’t have a clue.

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In order to understand
why George W. Bush doesn’t get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas
attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end
up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow — and who is genuinely
disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people.

On the few occasions when Bush does directly encounter
the down-and-out, he seems to empathize. But then, in what is becoming a recurring,
almost nightmare-type scenario, the minute he visits some constructive program and
praises it (AmeriCorps, the Boys and Girls Club, job training), he turns around
and cuts the budget for it. It’s the kiss of death if the president comes to praise
your program. During the presidential debate in Boston in 2000, Bush said, “First
and foremost, we’ve got to make sure we fully fund LIHEAP [the Low Income Home Energy
Assistance Program], which is a way to help low-income folks, particularly here
in the East, pay their high fuel bills.” He then sliced $300 million out of that
sucker, even as people were dying of hypothermia, or, to put it bluntly, freezing
to death.

Sometimes he even cuts your program
before he comes to praise it. In August 2002, Bush held a photo op with the
Quecreek coal miners, the nine men whose rescue had thrilled the country. By then
he had already cut the coal-safety budget at the Mine Safety and Health Administration,
which engineered the rescue, by 6 percent, and had named a coal-industry executive
to run the agency.

The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of
Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times
that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, “I don’t understand how poor
people think,” and had described himself as a “white Republican guy who doesn’t
get it, but I’d like to.” What’s annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the
blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as
he has acquired more power.

There was a telling episode in 1999
when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual statistics on hunger,
showing that once again Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger
because we have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like
Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be first in poverty,
first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in poverty, first in the percentage
of adults without a high school diploma, 51st in income per capita, and so on.

When the 1999 hunger stats were announced,
Bush threw a tantrum. He thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state
look bad because he was running for president. “I saw the report that children in
Texas are going hungry. Where?” he demanded. “No children are going to go hungry
in this state. You’d think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of
hunger in Texas.” You would, wouldn’t you? That is the point at which ignorance
becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time with people in the
colonias, South Texas’ shantytowns; he had never been to a session with Valley Interfaith,
a consortium of border churches and schools and the best community organization
in the state. There is no excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality
of Texas.

Take any area — environment, labor,
education, taxes, health — and go to the websites of public-interest groups
in that field. You will find page after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals,
no-big-deal new policies, all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent
change in regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below
the radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody’s favorite government
program, is being targeted for “improvement” by leaving it to the tender mercies
of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps refugees in Africa and Asia
gets its funding cut because one of the seven groups involved once worked with the
United Nations, which once worked with the Chinese government, which once supported
forced abortions.

So what manner of monster is behind
these outrages? I have known George W. Bush slightly since we were both in high
school, and I studied him closely as governor. He is neither mean nor stupid. What
we have here is a man shaped by three intertwining strands of Texas culture, combined
with huge blinkers of class. The three Texas themes are religiosity, anti-intellectualism,
and machismo. They all play well politically with certain constituencies.

Let’s assume the religiosity is genuine;
no one is in a position to know otherwise. I leave it to more learned
commentators to address what “Christian” might actually mean in terms of public
policy.

The anti-intellectualism is also authentic.
This is a grudge Bush has carried at least since his college days when he felt looked
down on as a frat rat by more cerebral types. Despite his pedigree and prep schools,
he ran into Eastern stereotypes of Texans at Yale, a common experience at Ivy schools
in that time. John F. Kennedy, the consummate, effortlessly graceful, classy Harvard
man, had just been assassinated in ugly old Dallas, and Lyndon Johnson’s public
piety gave many people the creeps. Texans were more or less thought of as yahoo
barbarians somewhere between the Beverly Hillbillies and Deliverance. I do not exaggerate
by much. To have a Texas accent in the East in those days was to have 20 points
automatically deducted from your estimated IQ. And Texans have this habit of playing
to the stereotype — it’s irresistible. One proud Texan I know had never owned
a pair of cowboy boots in his life until he got a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard.
Just didn’t want to let anyone down.

For most of us who grow up in the “boonies”
and go to school in the East, it’s like speaking two languages — Bill Clinton,
for example, is perfectly bilingual. But it’s not unusual for a spell in the East
to reinforce one’s Texanness rather than erode it, and that’s what happened to Bush.
Bush had always had trouble reading — we assume it is dyslexia (although Slate’s
Jacob Weisberg attributes it to aphasia); his mom was still doing flash cards with
him when he was in junior high. Feeling intellectually inferior apparently fed into
his resentment of Easterners and other known forms of snob.

Bush once said, “There’s a West Texas
populist streak in me, and it irritates me when these people come out to Midland
and look at my friends with just the utmost disdain.” In his mind, Midland is the
true-blue heartland of the old vox pop. The irony is that Midland along with its
twin city, Odessa, is one of the most stratified and narrow places in the country.
Both are oil towns with amazingly strict class segregation. Midland is the white-collar,
Republican town; Odessa is the blue-collar, Democratic town. The class conflict
plays out in an annual football rivalry so intense that H.G. Bissinger featured
it in his best-selling book, Friday Night Lights. To mistake Midland for the volk
heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut,
is Levittown.

In fact, people in Midland are real
nice folks: I can’t prove that with statistics, but I know West Texas and
it’s just a fact. Open, friendly, no side to ’em. The problem is, they’re way isolated
out there and way limited too. You can have dinner at the Petroleum Club anytime
with a bunch of them and you’ll come away saying, “Damn, those are nice people.
Sure glad they don’t run the world.” It is still such a closed, narrow place, where
everybody is white, Protestant, and agrees with everybody else. It’s not unusual
to find people who think, as George W. did when he lived there, that Jimmy Carter
was leading the country toward “European-style socialism.” A board member of the
ACLU of Texas was asked recently if there had been any trouble with gay bashing
in Midland. “Oh, hell, honey,” she drawled, “there’s not a gay in Midland who will
come out of the closet for fear people will think they’re Democrats.”

The machismo is what I suspect is fake.
Bush is just another upper-class white boy trying to prove he’s tough. The minute
he is questioned, he becomes testy and defensive. That’s one reason they won’t let
him hold many press conferences. When he tells stories about his dealings with two
of the toughest men who ever worked in politics — the late Lee Atwater and the
late Bob Bullock — Bush, improbably, comes off as the toughest mother in the
face-down. I wouldn’t put money on it being true. Bullock, the late lieutenant governor
and W’s political mentor in Texas, could be and often was meaner than a skilletful
of rattlesnakes. Bush’s story is that one time, Bullock cordially informed him that
he was about to fuck him. Bush stood up and kissed Bullock, saying, “If I’m gonna
get fucked, at least I should be kissed.” It probably happened, but I guarantee
you Bullock won the fight. Bush never got what made Bullock more than just a supermacho
pol — the old son of a bitch was on the side of the people. Mostly.

The perfect absurdity of all this,
of course, is that Bush’s identification with the sturdy yeomen of Midland (actually,
oil-company executives almost to a man) is so wildly at variance with his real background.
Bush likes to claim the difference between him and his father is that, “He went
to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High.” He did. For one
year. Then his family moved to a posh neighborhood in Houston, and he went to the
second-best prep school in town (couldn’t get into the best one) before going off
to Andover as a legacy.

Jim Hightower’s great line about Bush,
“Born on third and thinks he hit a triple,” is still painfully true. Bush has simply
never acknowledged that not only was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth — he’s
been eating off it ever since. The reason there is no noblesse oblige about Dubya
is because he doesn’t admit to himself or anyone else that he owes his entire life
to being named George W. Bush. He didn’t just get a head start by being his father’s
son — it remained the single most salient fact about him for most of his life.
He got into Andover as a legacy. He got into Yale as a legacy. He got into Harvard
Business School as a courtesy (he was turned down by the University of Texas Law
School). He got into the Texas Air National Guard — and sat out Vietnam — through
Daddy’s influence. (I would like to point out that that particular unit of
FANGers, as regular Air Force referred to the “Fucking Air National Guard,” included
not only the sons of Governor John Connally and Senator Lloyd Bentsen, but
some actual black members as well — they just happened to play football
for the Dallas Cowboys.) Bush was set up in the oil business by friends of his father.
He went broke and was bailed out by friends of his father. He went broke again and
was bailed out again by friends of his father; he went broke yet again and was bailed
out by some fellow Yalies.

That Bush’s administration is salted
with the sons of somebody-or-other should come as no surprise. I doubt it has ever
even occurred to Bush that there is anything wrong with a class-driven good-ol’-boy
system. That would explain why he surrounds himself with people like Eugene Scalia
(son of Justice Antonin Scalia), whom he named solicitor of the Department of Labor — apparently
as a cruel joke. Before taking that job, the younger Scalia was a handsomely paid
lobbyist working against ergonomic regulations designed to prevent repetitive stress
injuries. His favorite technique was sarcastic invective against workers who supposedly
faked injuries when the biggest hazard they faced was “dissatisfaction with
co-workers and supervisors.” More than 5 million Americans are injured on
the job every year, and more die annually from work-related causes than were
killed on September 11. Neither Scalia nor Bush has ever held a job requiring physical
labor.

What is the disconnect? One can see
it from the other side — people’s lives are being horribly affected by the Bush
administration’s policies, but they make no connection between what happens to them
and the decisions made in Washington. I think I understand why so many
people who are getting screwed do not know who is screwing them. What I don’t get
is the disconnect at the top. Is it that Bush doesn’t want to see? No one
brought it to his attention? He doesn’t care?

Okay, we cut taxes for the rich and
so we have to cut services for the poor. Presumably there is some right-wing justification
along the lines that helping poor people just makes them more dependent or something.
If there were a rationale Bush could express, it would be one thing, but to watch
him not see, not make the connection, is another thing entirely. Welfare, Medicare,
Social Security, food stamps — horrors, they breed dependency. Whereas
inheriting millions of dollars and having your whole life handed to you on a platter
is good for the grit in your immortal soul? What we’re dealing with here is a man
in such serious denial it would be pathetic if it weren’t damaging so many lives.

Bush’s lies now fill volumes. He lied
us into two hideously unfair tax cuts; he lied us into an unnecessary war with disastrous
consequences; he lied us into the Patriot Act, eviscerating our freedoms. But when
it comes to dealing with those less privileged, Bush’s real problem is not deception,
but self-deception.

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